“I just met a representative of Fujinet headquartered in HCM City and found that the enterprise’s production and business performance is very good with high growth rates of 20-30 percent. What is the driving force for growth for the enterprise, if noting that its personnel has expanded just a little, but productivity has increased sharply?" said An Ngoc Thao, deputy secretary general of VINASA (Vietnam Software & IT services), speaking to VietNamNet on the sidelines of Japan ICT Day 2024 held in Hanoi on December 2.

The driving force was human resource optimization, together with AI application, he said.

Fujinet spent three years to develop an AI (artificial intelligence) automated text extractor using OCR technology for Japanese clients with no revenue, and then witnessed the revenue boom this year. Many Japanese partners contacted Fujinet to place orders, including businesses in Vietnam and Japan, and mega projects.

The AI core is researched and developed by Fujinet staff which can be used to solve different problems, from identity card recognition to text form recognition.

“It is AI which has created new vitality for BPO (business process outsourcing) services of many Vietnamese enterprises. After the initial boom period, the number of BPO projects for Japan developed by Japanese firms once shrank because of low income and huge investment."

But recently, thanks to AI which helps reduce required investment (machines can replace workers to undertake simple works such as letter recognition, image recognition, flower and fruit reckoning and error product detection) and increase profitability, the upward trend in BPO projects has returned. However, these are positioned as projects providing AI related services which can bring much higher values.

“The projects using new technologies such as AI have relatively high unit prices, about $4,000-5,000 per head per month,” Thao said.

After eight years of implementing hundreds of projects for 20 Japanese partners, NTT e-MOI has also effectively used AI.

“Blockchain was the technological trend of some years ago. The growing trend recently is low-code no-code plus AI technology,” said Nguyen Thi Anh from NTT e-MOI.

“We have implemented many projects for Japanese customers by exploiting the advantages of new technology to shorten the time needed for development. In some cases, the time needed to complete a software system is just one fourth of traditional methods.

“We have determined that low-code no-code platform, plus AI application will be our major growth driving force in the future, with targeted growth rate of 150 percent per annum,” Anh said.

Analysts say that Japanese partners have become more openhearted when working with Vietnam’s IT firms. Previously, they were very picky and Japanese businesses just wanted exactly what they requested. But nowadays, Japanese partners highly appreciate Vietnamese engineers’ capability. Therefore, they request Vietnamese businesses to give advice, so that the two sides can ‘go together for a long distance’.

NTT plans to expand BPO to provide high-quality services to the Japanese market. The services won’t just be data entry. The workers to deploy BPO services can speak Japanese like native speakers, and have professional business analysis skills. With the service expansion, its staff is expected to increase to hundreds of workers in the next 2-3 years.

$200 billion market

Mentioning the new requirements from the Japanese market, VINASA’s deputy secretary general An Ngoc Thao quoted interesting information in the speech of Junya Kawamoto, Chair of the JISA International Cooperation Committee, at Japan ICT Day 2024. Currently, not only Japanese businesses are seeking services from Vietnam, but many organizations and units in the public sector are doing this because the skills of Vietnamese human resources have approached Japan’s expectations, while Japan is increasingly lacking workers.

According to Junya Kawamoto, Japan’s IT service sector had the revenue of $200 billion and employed 1.17 million workers in 2022. The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed shortcomings of the old IT system in the public sector. This prompted Japan to set up Japan digital agency and deploy new policies, such as Cloud Government and DFFT (Data Free Flow with Trust).

As for the private economic sector, METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry) is encouraging digitization through the DX Stocks program.

Binh Minh